London: The London 2012 Festival opens on Thursday 21 June and the London 2012 Live Sites, big screens in 22 towns and cities across the UK, will show festival films to mark the first day of the UK-wide celebrations and entertain thousands of people throughout the day.
The London 2012 Festival team have worked with the BBC to develop a programme of films that will run throughout the day on the permanent big screens in Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Derby, Dover, Edinburgh, Leicester, Leeds, Liverpool, Londonderry, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Norwich, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Swansea, Swindon, Waltham Forest and Woolwich.
The screens will show films from events in the London 2012 Festival, including the Tracey Emin Review Show interview, excerpts from previous BBC Proms, films made by young people through the Cultural Olympiad’s Film Nation:Shorts programme, excerpts from Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) shows for the World Shakespeare Festival, clips of female comedians performing from the BFI archive to celebrate the venue’s Britain’s Queens of UK TV Comedy programme, and a film about Sacrilege, the life-sized inflatable replica of Stonehenge by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller that will pop up in places around the UK throughout the London 2012 Festival.
Yoko Ono’s worldwide initiative of anti-violence, IMAGINE PEACE, will be unveiled on the screens on the day, with the IMAGINE PEACE message translated into 24 world languages and repeated through the day.
For children and families there will be a screenings after school at 4.00pm and 6.00pm of the Guinness world record breaking and BAFTA winning film ‘The Itch of the Golden Nit’. The film, made through The Tate Movie Project as part of the Cultural Olympiad, is an animated adventure drawn and dreamt up by thousands of children across the UK and narrated by leading TV stars including David Walliams, Miranda Hart, Catherine Tate and Rik Mayall.
A celebration of the body in a variety of dance forms, often linked in film to athletics, has been a theme that has resonated in digital work across the UK. A selection of work from the North West and South West of England, the Midlands, London and Edinburgh, called The Moving Body, is scheduled to be showcased in two screenings on Thursday at 1.00pm and 5.00pm.
The big day on the big screens will culminate with a live BBC broadcast of The Big Concert from Stirling at 7.30pm with the Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. The live broadcast will be preceded by a build up to the concert featuring footage from the Big Noise project, an orchestra programme that uses music making to foster confidence, teamwork, pride and aspiration in the children taking part and across their wider community in the Scottish community of Raploch, Stirling.
The London 2012 Festival, a 12 week UK-wide celebration for the Olympic and Paralympic Games which brings together leading artists from across the world with the very best from the UK, opens 21 June 2012 with a spectacular burst of events across the UK. This ‘once in a lifetime’ Festival features more than 25,000 artists from all 204 competing Olympic nations. Everyone will be able to join in the celebration with over 10 million free tickets and opportunities to take part in 12,000 events and performances at 900 venues all over the UK, including 130 world premieres and 85 UK premieres.